mygidon73

[mygidon73]

10 minutes inside a Haifa bomb shelter 

The siren went off at 8:45 last Friday morning. I had just gotten back from a 4-mile jog around Haifa’s Mercaz HaCarmel and was drenched in sweat. The sustained wail sounded strangely muted, as if it were piped through an old computer laptop speaker.   Was this for real? Any uncertainty was dispelled as soon as my eyes locked with those of my 12-year-old daughter. Our separate suspicions melded…

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Waiting for war in Haifa

Metula, Shlomi, Kiryat Shmona, Margaliot. These were small quaint towns before Oct. 7. Today, they are virtual moonscapes, where abandoned farms are inhabited only by livestock and chickens. The people are almost all gone. Since Oct. 8, the Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon has been attacking Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis. 60,000 civilians have…

[mygidon73]

On Jewish Powerlessness

Israel’s military brass and political leadership are dithering over whether and how Israel should respond to Iran’s attack last week. The Israeli public, however, seems to have made up its mind. According to a poll released this week by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 74% of the Israeli public opposes a counterstrike “If it undermines Israel’s security alliance with its allies.” Only 26% are…

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Breaking Israel's Opium Addiction

How addicted is Jerusalem to Washington’s military aid? Israel’s planned preemptive strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon on Oct. 11, was narrowly averted after President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stand down, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. While Netanyahu dismissed this claim, members of his own Likud Party are increasingly speaking out against…

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A Soldier’s Tale: The Parakeet in the Abandoned School on the Gaza Border

Sderot is located less than a mile from the Gaza Strip. Some ninety per cent of the town’s 30,000 residents fled on October 7 after Hamas invaded southern Israel. My wife’s cousin, Ilan, is currently stationed with his infantry unit in what was, until recently, a Sderot elementary school. The happy, high-pitched yelping of children has been replaced by the metallic sounds of assault rifles being…

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Wrath of God II: To Win, Israel Must Assassinate Hamas Leaders Everywhere

Israel’s military achievements against Hamas are impressive. As part of its campaign to destroy the terrorist group, Israel has reportedly struck over 22,000 targets in the Gaza Strip and has killed some 7,000 fighters since the war broke out.Since Israel’s land campaign began, the IDF has discovered over eight hundred tunnels, many which were located near or inside educational institutions,…

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Merry Christmas! Hanukkah Is Canceled

Anyone still clinging to the belief that there is a difference between hating Jews and wanting Israel to disappear now needs to explain away another inconvenient truth. Scheduled Hanukkah celebrations across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere have been scrapped. The reason cited over and over is that hosting such holiday events would imply support for Israel in its war against the…

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Becoming Israeli Again

Before October 7, living in Israel could leave you battered, bruised, and needing a stiff drink. Sky high housing prices, exorbitant childcare costs, heavy regulations, relatively low median wages that translate into a lack of purchasing power, and an overdependence on imports for food and other essentials are the bare bone basics of life here. When you combine all that with rising interest…

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Sometimes fists matter more than facts

“There are no accidents, only encounters in history,” wrote Elie Wiesel. The outbreak of antisemitism that has swept across US college campuses is not a spontaneous reaction to Hamas’s massacre of over 1200 men, women, and children – a day during which the Gaza-based terrorist group kidnapped over two hundred people. Hamas’s invasion of the Jewish state, as well as the organization’s fans at Ivy…

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Never Again Is Now: Why Jews Must Take Back the Holocaust

As Jewish communities gather to mark Kristallnacht (‘Night of Broken Glass’), the 1938 pogrom across Nazi Germany that many consider to be the start of the Holocaust, ‘never again’ is resounding. The phrase, long associated with the Final Solution, is now spoken repeatedly as a vow by world leaders in the context of the October 7 massacre in Israel that left 1,400 people dead, thousands wounded,…

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Dark laughter: How Israelis are using humour in a time of war

“They’re cockroaches. Instead of Iron Dome we need a big Iron Shoe to stomp out every one of them,” the mild-mannered pediatrician grinned at me after he had examined my daughter’s ailing foot. “Give her Nurofen for three days after meals. That should do the trick.” As my nine-year-old was putting her sneakers back on, her new favourite doctor, a Christian Arab born and raised in Nazareth,…

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Image Is Nothing, Moral Clarity Is Everything

It is the most natural human reaction after someone experiences trauma, loss, and heartache to reach out, to want love, sympathy, warmth, and comfort from friends, family – even strangers. We all need people to reassure us that they feel our pain and that they care about us. But that most basic of human needs, to not be alone, cannot be the basis for a country’s security because it leads to…

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A House Divided: Days of Rage in Israel

I spoke to a friend of mine yesterday who had relocated with his wife and young daughter from Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva a few months ago. We both moved to Israel from the United States at around the same time — he from Chicago, I from Los Angeles. We left Israel’s capital city within a few months of each other. I headed north with my wife and four kids, he hitched his wagon and set out for a new…

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Teaching Your Children About War: An Israeli Father Struggles to Get It Right

It’s 3:36am, on Tuesday, October 10, 2023. I’m tossing and turning right now. Our little country is in a fight for its life. Yes, we’ll prevail. But the cost will be terribly high, almost unbearable. We keep hearing fighter planes as they jet south. The Lebanon-based Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, is saber rattling. They have launched a couple of dozen rockets into northern Israel. In a skirmish just…

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I was priced out of spiraling Jerusalem. I got a second lease on life in Haifa

Greetings from Haifa, where the daily stress of life in Israel somehow melts away...

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Choose Your Own Adventure for Preserving Her Childhood

What can a dad do when each choice seems like the worst choice for his daughter's future...

“What’s that?” asks my daughter, Libby. It is a discarded dildo, laying on the dusty trail between the train station we just left and her elementary school. In a flash, two tiny figures appear in mid-air. Over my right shoulder, a fella named Cool Hand Luke goes into high gear: “Don’t be so nervous. She’s old enough to know what’s going on. You better do it now or she’ll learn about it from…

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It Only Hurts To Pray

It Only Hurts To Pray

RODNEY IAN Birnbaum’s purple-trimmed prayer shawl slices through the early morning Jerusalem air with a vengeance. God only knows when, if ever, he’ll be this close to the source of all creation. Even among the world’s most devout he stands – or more accurately, sways – apart. Every Friday morning for the last five years Birnbaum has made the hour-long trek on noisy, steamy, green buses from his…